Prosodic Experimentation in Hopkins’ Poetry

Abstract

The paper aims to explore prosodic experimentation and musical sensibility designed for limning the dynamism observed in the Victorian world by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poetry, especially, in “The Windhover”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Pied Beauty”, “Inversnaid” and “Spring”. Through a close reading of the prosody, rhythm, rhyme, metrics, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in Hopkins’ poems from the theoretical paradigms of the prosody, and sprung rhythm, propounded by Hopkins himself, and some other theorists, the study is an attempt to prove how Gerard Manley Hopkins exploits the rhythmic novelty to give each poem a distinctive design to capture his apprehension of dynamism, the intense thrust of energy in nature. The finding is that it was the Victorian culture and milieu evoked by the Second Industrial Revolution, technological advance, and Hopkins’ conviction that God manifested in the material world that influenced him to use innovative rhythmic patterns in his poetry so that we could perceive how the universe is characterized by a distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. It is expected that researchers intending to observe the prosodic techniques in poetry in general and Hopkins in particular can take the paper as a reference.